and so it would appear that i cannot go a month without some sort of Bowie post here. further, look you see, it would seem that i am not quite prepared to let Tonight go just quite yet. well, it all too easily and (for me) lazily gets dismissed as "rubbish", etc, when that frankly or rather to be frankie, is not the case at all.
following on from my recent look at the mysteries surrounding at least one aspect of the Loving The Alien video, be it elements of controversy and censorship, time then for Blue Jean. well, actually, to be specific, Jazzin For Blue Jean, for this is somewhat different to "just" the standard pop video. those who know will, er, know. oh.
believe it or not (and it's not that i don't care which, i am just not interested), this quasi "follow up" post wasn't all my idea. it has (accidentally) been prompted by a good friend, but we shall get to that in a couple of pictures.
there it is, "my" tape copy of Bowie's Tonight album. as it happens, or actually, this was my Dad's. he presumably bought it for his car for his travels. somehow i ended up "borrowing" it, he never quibbled or requested a return, and so it became "mine". much more, this tape was my childhood friend. well, most of it. some of it. usually i listened to Loving The Alien, which was the first track on side one, then turned it over, rewound a bit, then listened to Blue Jean. every now and then, i suppose, i would give the titular song, Tonight, a spin. quite a soothing lullaby on this album, it is, to be sure, despite the original intention of the song being rather different.
was this the tape, the moment, the experience which turned me into a Bowie fan? yes, probably, for convenience. at this precise moment, no, i was not a "Bowiephile" or fanatic, or even aware of all that much of his work. thanks to a famously misunderstood joke on The Young Ones, here, at the age of 11 or so, i was one of those ones not entirely sure if Bowie was indeed Australian.
musically, then, i was at that crossroads which most who approached their teens from the 60s onwards face, where your tastes and passions change and tend to be set for life. no, i doubt anyone is interested in this too, but here we are. at this point i would say that i was coming to accept Adam Ant was fading fast, i was resisting the patent genius of Duran Duran for i was insanely jealous of how they, John Taylor in particular, looked better than i ever could, Frankie Goes To Hollywood were coming to be the be all and end all of everything, it was a struggle to know if Depeche Mode were really smart or really twats, i loved The Stones and The Who more than i could ever take to The Beatles, and this bloke called Bowie would not go away.
two of the above came together, then, in Jazzin' For Blue Jean. it was something i felt compelled to watch the "world premiere" of on Channel 4, as Channel 4 kept promoting it and advertising it during shows such as The Tube. and so i watched. yes, at the time, considering my age and lack of knowledge about Bowie, i was mostly confused to the point of boredom by it, bar of course the absolutely magnificent song at the heart of it all.
would i say my musical tastes led to my having a keen, or acute, sense of solitude, isolation and loneliness, or were they somewhat self-imposed because of my interests? both, i guess, and many other reasons. on top of the musical comments above, at this time i was only recently (in the grand scheme of thing) extracted from Australia and returned home. i did so filled with the music of that faraway land, and was most confused that none of England appeared to have (in 1984) extensive knowledge of the works of Split Enz and Mental As Anything, or even be aware of how something called the Starstruck soundtrack even existed. hey, we live as we dream; alone.
at the time of Jazzin' For Blue Jean it is worth noting that we are mid-1984. this is pre Band Aid and pre Live Aid love ins. whereas the music world mostly went quite tame and friendly after that, before such musical rivals could be a bit off with each other. this is kind of what happens in the video, although not dramatically nasty. at once Bowie bestows a great, virtually peerless in value blessing on Frankie Goes To Hollywood by simply acknowledging they exist, but in doing so has a bit of a dig.....
yes, indeed, it would probably be best for you to seek out the whole of the Jazzin' For Blue Jean video and watch it properly, but the above snippet shall hopefully do, since we are here now. in answer to Bowie's comment, about "not promoting Frankie until they tell us who Frankie is", well, as is widely known, the band (it is claimed) took their name from a Variety newspaper article about Mr Sinatra making the move into movies, headlined Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
no, that is not a genuine Frankie Goes To Hollywood t-shirt. the real ones said things like Frankie Say Relax, or Frankie Say War, or Frankie Say Arm The Unemployed and so on. bootlegs either just had Relax on them, or a grammatical error, namely Frankie Says not Frankie Say. Frankie was a collective group of (magnificent) people, not one person, so Say is right. personally, i like to think of Bowie buying this t-shirt off a dodgy market stall or barrow boy in Brixton, Camden, Bexley or similar. in reality, he probably paid one of his many designer friends, such as Vivienne and Jean-Paul, many thousands of pounds to "specially create" it for him.
how is that this, all of this, well no just bits of it, came to mind and now here we are, either writing or reading this? that is down to the adventures of Spiros. he was roaming around London, presumably looking to meet gentleman for short term yet mutually beneficial friendships, or maybe to fight a taxi driver or two, when he spotted this and very kindly sent me an image.
i have absolutely no reason at all to doubt the veracity and provenance of the above, for what reason would it not be the "real deal", the one worn by the gentleman himself. what saddens me is the fact that he gave it away, or had it pinched, rather than keeping it as part of his impressive and undoubtedly lavish wardrobe.
the manner of my departure, if we are honest, is most likely going to be a torturous, painful and agonizing one, brought about from my expressed interest in cigarettes. sympathy shall neither be supplied nor sought. it is something that shall undoubtedly bring a measured level of pleasure to more than a few, and it shall be a pleasure that is far more understandable in nature than it is sadistic. failing that, i have every confidence that some clever or inventive type shall construct a way to dispose of me in a way that prompts no questions beyond accidental or natural, or abide by the law which says that of there is no body then there is no crime. given the unexpected luxury of choice, then i think i would like to just drift away, with a tape of Blue Jean and Loving The Alien on repeat playing away. perhaps this happened some 34 or 35 years ago, and this is all some really strange existential awareness.
looking back at Jazzin' For Blue Jean reveals a lot more than was acknowledged at the time, and further makes a mockery of this idea that everything associated with the Tonight album is a complete write-off. superficially one could say yes, Jazzin' probably got green lighted to be made because of the insane success of "extended music video" Thriller a year or so before, with "success" meaning "it led to millions of record sales". but, let us not forget that Bowie started off as an actor, and continued to be an actor "on the side". he very much used the "freedom" of the music video format to act and do all sorts of things, ones which we maybe did not pick up on a the time.
if we, as i believe was the intention (the climax of the video certainly suggests so), set aside the characters he is playing in the video, this scene is a clumsy, overbearing, over eager David Bowie confronting a fragile, frail, withdrawn David Bowie who happens to be watching the public, second to none performing David Bowie on tv. words such as "meta" and "existential" don't really quite cover it, and it's extraordinary for a mid-80s pop video. fort those who clamoured for a Bowie autobiography, or wished that he would reveal more of himself, he never really hid it. just when he dropped in aspects of how he felt, what he believed it, how he viewed himself, we all somehow merrily overlooked it.
anything i took away in particular from the Jazzin' For Blue Jean video? yes. what turned out to be a wildly inaccurate, fanciful and overtly optimistic idea of what going to pubs, clubs and concerts might be all like. bear in mind (if you will), please, that i was 11, so had no real idea and certainly did not know better.
in the video, whether it be the pub at the start of the nightclub where Blue Jean is performed by Screaming Lord Byron, there's a hip, cool, trendy, avant garde, sophisticated feel. there is also a sense of unity, of belonging, of being as one. so, then, yes, it was something of a frustration, and a great disappointment, by the time that i got to (merely three years before) the legal age where i may go to such places, they were nothing at all like the Blue Jean video. at least not the ones i went to.
perhaps it is just me (or i), but surely life would be much, much better if pubs, clubs and concerts were all as flamboyantly fabulous as presented in Jazzin' For Blue Jean. not to be, i guess, what with the world at large preferring much lower class and unpleasant things.
it feels like i have defended Tonight "more than once", but since we are here let me do it again. to dismiss the album entirely is just folly. for a start Loving The Alien is, musically and lyrically, astonishingly ambitious and complex. it would neither look nor sound out of place on any of his greatest works, in particular Station To Station or The Buddha Of Suburbia. equally Blue Jean is a superb, outstanding flat out pop single. it's brilliant. it is absolutely the case that this album is very much worth the time of any music lover.
some video of this much fabled "club scene" off of the Blue Jean video that i expected to encounter as i grew up? why not. look quite carefully at the band in the background, one of "musicians" kind of went on to be quite famous some seven years after the video was made. or, if you like, 28 or so years ago from now, when this was written. blimey.
yes, you are quite right. sort of semi clearly visible (Bowie was meant to be the focus, after all), and unusually resplendent with hair, is indeed Richard Fairbrass. on the bass, i believe. had you answered with words along the lines of "one of them bald twats off of f*****g Right Said Fred", technically you would have been correct but also quite mean. they were just a happy go lucky band, man, singing their songs and making people happy. get over yourself if you have the free time to think bad things about Right Said Fred.
earlier (as opposed to later on) i mentioned how concepts of "meta" and "existential" or what have you came to the for at the conclusion, or if you like climax, of the Jazzin' For Blue Jean film. we get treated to a moment of David Bowie jeering and hurling abuse at David Bowie, with one of the highlights of this being the dig that "your album artwork is more interesting that your music". no, it most certainly was not common in the mid-80s, in jest or for real, for any musician to rubbish their own work, least of all someone as famous as Bowie. as point of fact, the nearest closest i can think of anyone else doing something like this was Mick and Charlie off of the Stones, when they delightfully mocked their own age as part of an advert for the Monty Python "not all dead" reunion.
possibly due to lacking any sort of other coherent conclusion, the final scene of the film has a subversion of the fourth wall breaker, with a distant shot of David Bowie very much as David Bowie berating director Julien Temple for the film not ending as he had planned it. yes, this sort of thing was very much an 80s device, quite popular with The Comic Strip and others, from what i remember. or perhaps i am wrong.
inevitably the conclusion here is that never again shall we see the likes of Jazzin' For Blue Jean. whilst it would be easy to say this is because we simply lack anyone of the talent, vision and ability of David Bowie, that's perhaps not true. you have to think that out there is someone very much as talented. we have, in this era of free for all, dismantled all the standard filters for quality. also, with no money whatsoever to be made in just the music alone, you would not have a record label invest time and money in an artist to let them develop. i would be quite surprised if ever again someone got to make an avant garde, confusing, self subverting twenty minute video for a three minute pop song.
well, that's about that for this, then. i would say that i am fairly confident i've exhausted all possible things to write of Bowie for a while, but then it would not be a surprise to see me do something else in a month or so. and why not.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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